Mortals (76 page)

There was a consultation going on. They were taking their time.

But there would be a market for what he could do. He could compress any life into a jewel. Rex would know where the market for this was, would have, he meant. Of course he knew what Iris would say. She would say, Oh obituaries. But obituaries were the opposite of analytic and the opposite of what he had in mind. And he was not going to limit himself to the dead. He would do anyone he felt like, if he wanted to. Beware me, he thought. He would do the poor as well as the eminent. He would do it. He could. He would find Wemberg and make him a jewel. Aubrey was wonderful but naive, and he, when he did his Lives, would be the opposite
of naive. He would do evil subjects, too, which Aubrey as a courtier couldn’t. Quartus would be a good subject. Of course he would need to support himself somehow while he wrote, but that could be arranged, he could always teach in Africa, in a second. He would be the freezing eye of the basilisk. He thought, My eye and hand will be sovereign, beware me.

“Thank you,” he said. He had reached a conclusion about his life, the life to come that he was grateful for. He was grateful to Quartus and his minions. He was reminded of Iris saying to him, When I want your opinion I’ll beat it out of you. It had nothing to do with his situation. But he was grateful to Quartus for the thoughts that had been what, knocked loose. I can be anything, he thought. James Joyce wanted to be a tenor. Joyce
was
a tenor, but he had wanted to be paid for it. He should have tried more. I might sing, he thought.

He was clutching the armrests and a hard hit came to his hands, one two left right, pretty hard. Up to that moment they hadn’t hit his hands. We need our hands, he thought. He also didn’t want to be hit on the head more than he had if he could help it. He was too dry to spit, spit at them. But also it was true he didn’t want the consequences of spitting at anyone. It was like joining the army and saying okay, if I die, then okay, if I die doing the job, the job of being all I can be, killing people. People joining the army were prepared to imagine themselves vaporized, made nothing, and to accept that. But they weren’t embracing the possibility of ending up permanently crippled in a ward someplace, which was of course likelier than getting blown to vapor. Someone should publicize the actual odds.

His thirst was getting dire. If they hurled water at him whatever little he might contrive to catch by having his mouth open would almost be worth it. They knew he was thirsty. There was more water-pouring and lip-smacking water-drinking going on.

He felt like singing something, but he was afraid to. But he might hum. He was achieving something, being obstreperous. He was using up their time. They couldn’t stay in place forever. He was getting across, he hoped, the idea that he was crazy or being made crazy.

He wanted to sing, but first he would hum. It was too bad he didn’t know how the Boer hymn went, “Die Stem.” That would have been good. What he was humming had started out indeterminately but was, he realized, turning into “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”

“He is a moffie.” That was the beast calling him a homosexual by another Boer term.

“Shut that,”
Quartus said, but it wasn’t clear to Ray whether it was directed at him or at the beast. He continued to hum.

Quartus was very close to him again, close enough that with a sharp lunge Ray would be able to bang Quartus hard in the face. It would hurt too much because his head was already caged in pain.

Quartus said, very deliberately, “Meneer, this is what you must understand …

“You can stop this humming. Now.

“And you must understand that you
will
tell us what we need to have you tell us. Ah yes. And if you prefer to tell us tomorrow, in the afternoon tomorrow, that will be fine. Or in the evening, fine as well …”

Ray was going to escalate into song. They would hate it. Some deep flow of pressure to really sing was rising, rising.

Ray said, “I am going to sing now.”

That confused them. They were listening, wondering if he was saying something in American they were not up on that meant he was going to cooperate. He liked that.

“Yes, meneers, is that correct, the plural, but yes. I have decided to sing. Sing for you.”

He cleared his throat. He had a faint hope they would offer him something to drink, as encouragement. He couldn’t wait for that. Nothing was offered. He cleared his throat again.

The flow swelling up through him was fine, it was driving him to sing, but the song was important. It should be apposite, if it could, otherwise it would be a waste, like his life. What we call songs were originally what, cries, roars, screams. An apposite song would be one with the line
The guy behind you won’t leave you alone
.

It was a good idea to make them wait for everything, as long as he could, because they were going to have to go and there would be less time for the next victim. Now he was making them wait because the song to rise up with was a problem. He would rise with the song, like a rocket ship, rise, slip upward. He had it. He had it.

Not only could he sing, he could be a singer, become one. There was the story about Chaplin launching into an aria for a lark at a party and doing it so excellently the crowd was stunned and Chaplin saying that he hadn’t been singing, he had just been impersonating Caruso or whoever it was. Be all that you can be, he thought. He had his song, or the main part of it.

That was another thing his brother had driven him crazy with, but that now he had to be grateful for. His brother had listened to crap teen music while he had been trying to get the basic classical music repertoire into his head via Doug Pledger on KFO, really trying. And
there had been no way to control his brother and the noise coming from his room. And anything he had objected to had made Rex play it more. So he had stopped. But he remembered a perfect thing, “Town Without Pity,” a thing he had heard over and over and over and now it was perfect for his needs. God moves in mysterious ways, when he moves at all, Ray thought.

Like an egg opening in his mind and disclosing a jewel, he had the whole thing end to end. He loved his brother. Rex, I love you, he thought, commencing to sing, loud.

He threw himself into the whining, petulant, portentous tone the thing needed, needed to be real, be what it was, then. His brother was dead. His brother was dead.

The force to really sing was coming from somewhere, deep somewhere …

He sang,

He hoped they wouldn’t hit him because the denouement was coming. He went into it.

He had sung it deeply whiningly, emphasizing but not mocking the stupidity. How stupid had his brother been to love this crap, except that of course, of course he understood why now, the gay implication, okay. He went on. To a really stupid bridge part.

Poor bugger, he thought, Rex, poor bugger, I wish I had loved you.

There was a funny something going on. People, thugs, were being brought in to hear him sing. The room was fuller. He could feel that. He didn’t care. Rise into it, he thought.

He was thinking that if you were able to add up the amount of fun anyone had had in their lives, fun had, a quotient, it would tell you something. This singing was fun. It was deep.

He sang hard,

Then, really hard and wild,

He had inhabited a song that had been a curse to him. Now he would sing like someone else, because he was not through singing, no.

“Come in,” he said to no one.

Now he would sing as himself. He was lost in himself. He would sing “Carrickfergus” the way Joyce would have sung it, may have sung it, he had no idea. How he knew this song, he had no idea. He had heard it sung at a party and he had heard it on a record at another party and because of God he had it, most of it, the greatest song ever written expressing being totally drunk, it was being drunk at its best, stupid best, and he had remembered it and at another party he had volunteered to sing it and Iris had said No in the name of God, no, don’t. Because it would embarrass her because he had been at the time very drunk. But then that part of their life had come to a close long ago and he had been fine since.

And he was starting to sing before he even intended it, and not as himself, as a drunken soul, the inspiration of this expression … He was full of song.

He wanted to startle them with his loud sound.

He did.

He was certain there was an assemblage in the room. Someone began to applaud but the act was quashed. Ray seemed to have nonplussed his tormentors, for the moment. He felt a little triumphant. He even felt a little drunk. They could applaud if they wanted. He had sung piercingly, Irishly.

Someone was softly laughing. Ray wanted water badly. He thought he could sing the part about the handsome rover singing no more till he got a drink. His throat was dry. It was stinging.

He relished the silence that his effort had produced.

“I’ll take a drink, now,” he said, retaining a touch of the character he had sung as.

There was laughter, and some murmuring, and then like a slash water was flung in his face. He caught some, enough to make a decent swallow. He had been ready. It was a triumph. He had bitten some water out of the air, was the way it felt.

“Tomorrow you’ll give us another show, meneer. Yah, man, but with less music.”

Ray was unstrapped from the chair without ceremony, roughly. His hood was jerked fully down and retied more tightly than was necessary. He was pulled to his feet and pushed forward. He almost fell, but saved himself by clutching onto Quartus’s table and leaning on it until the whiteness behind his eyes receded.

Definitely they were rougher, hustling him along, two of them, than before. Everything is a signal, he thought.

Crossing the open ground back to his cell was hard, at the faster pace being forced on him. He wasn’t being allowed to place his feet tentatively enough to knock rocks and pebbles and other impedimenta out of the way. He needed his shoes back. He was in stocking feet and the soles of his socks had turned planklike with sweat and filth, which was some help. But he wanted his shoes. And he wanted his wristwatch and he wanted to know how he looked, as a subject of abuse. He was curious. His beard was coming in. He wanted a mirror. He needed a haircut. He needed Iris, his barber. He was going to have to go to barbers, regular barbers, after she went away. She was going to. He knew everything that was going to happen.

“How do I look?” he asked stupidly, as he was thrown into his cell. He did the drill, stood with his back to the door while they took his hood off and then left, leaving him standing there locked in, with more to say.

“Okay,”
he shouted after them.

He needed help. He collapsed onto his pallet and all his injuries began pulsing in unison. He felt like an ad, a display.

The whiteness in his head was back. He was yielding to it. He couldn’t help it. But tomorrow would come and he was not through singing.

Night came and went. It was very cold. He was given food and water the next day, but that was the limit of the attention his captors paid to him, and then it was night again. He slept well in spite of the cold and spent the day following in a condition of anticipation that proved to be pointless. Again he was fed. But no one came for him. He wondered whether he was being deliberately ignored, whether that was part of the protocol, or if it was the press of other business that was the explanation. In any case he was weathering it. He was learning that he didn’t need to attack each onset of dead time with games or exercises or purposive thinking. He could enter the absences and stay in them with everything shut down,
the associative thought-chains fading out. It was unusual to not be thinking and to be aware of it, thinking about it at the same time. If he was correct, this condition was a prize that mystics labored to grasp. There was nothing blissful about it, at least not in the scraps and fragments of the state he had attained to so far. He could do without it.